Replicating ServiceNow Data in a Data Warehouse: A Guide

For greater control and value, organizations can replicate ServiceNow data in a data warehouse.

What Is a Data Warehouse?

A data warehouse is a centralized system that aggregates and consolidates data from diverse sources, including application log files and transaction apps. 

Over time, a data warehouse becomes a rich pool of historical data. Data warehouses serve purposes beyond mere data storage, and are strategic assets that fuel the continuous improvement of operations, strategic planning, and innovation.

When replicating data in a data warehouse, organizations can more effectively query the system to retrieve relevant data, information and insight.

• See also: Why ServiceNow Data Replication is an Essential Enterprise Capability

As such, decision-makers are better able to make informed choices – based on a comprehensive understanding of their data – and the organization is more able to leverage data to add value and save time.

Data Warehouses Uses

• Creating a single source of truth: By centralizing data from multiple sources, a data warehouse creates a “single source of truth,” providing organizations with access to more complete data sets and greater ability to draw accurate insights.
• Reporting: Data warehouses combine multiple data sources, including current operational data and historical data. As such they can act as a comprehensive hub for reporting needs – including the analysis of data over time and trends. They also allow such reporting to be produced more quickly with it available in a centralized location, as compared with the cumbersome process of collating data from disparate systems.
• BI, AI and ML: Data warehouses are better equipped to meet the processing demands of business intelligence, artificial intelligence and machine learning, delivering the large amounts of data the processes require.
• Auditing and regulatory compliance: The availability of historical data in a data warehouse supports organization’s auditing and regulatory compliance efforts. Relevant data – records and other information – can be retrieved quickly, saving organization’s time, money and resources.

Why Replicate ServiceNow Data in a Data Warehouse?

ServiceNow is a key source of insightful information for enterprise that are able to utilize it.

However, the platform is somewhat of a data silo, lacking the in-built functionality to effectively distribute ServiceNow data to external platforms. 

Integrations for ServiceNow can automate the replication and transfer of data to data warehouses, improving the availability of data, and an organization’s ability to work with it.

It allows organizations to combine ServiceNow data with other sources, within a repository where access can be controlled and extended beyond ServiceNow users only. 

With better data availability and more control over its access and use, organizations benefit from improved insight – from the speed in which informative reporting and analysis can be conducted, to the quality of results they return. 

For example, with ServiceNow data and other sources readily available for analysis, organizations can create reports that demonstrate whether there is a correlation between the time-to-resolution of ServiceNow tickets and their customer retention rate. 

Organizations could also analyze the impact a healthy ServiceNow instance has on customer satisfaction. In this case, an organization can leverage a data warehouse to identify the relationship between performance of key systems and the quality of its service delivery. I.e. Spikes in poor ServiceNow performance may correlate with an uptick in negative feedback from customers. 

Organizations that replicate ServiceNow data in a data warehouse can perform these types of cross-functional analyses more easily, quickly and accurately, making better decisions as a result. 

• See also: ServiceNow Data Replication – A Step-by-Step Guide

Benefits of Replicating ServiceNow Data in a Data Warehouse 

By replicating servicenow data to an external data warehouse, organizations experience benefits including:

• Improved ServiceNow performance: Running data extensive reports and/or performance analytics on ServiceNow consumes system resources and degradades performance. With ServiceNow data in a data warehouse,  organizations can perform extensive reporting and analysis tasks without consuming ServiceNow’s resources. 
• Historical analysis: Data warehouses enable the analysis of data and how it changes overtime.
• Perform complex queries, faster: With data from multiple sources available in one location, more complex queries can be performed.
• Democratized access: By replicating ServiceNow data to a data warehouse, organizations can enable self-serve analytics, without requiring extra ServiceNow licenses or ill-advised practices such as credential sharing. Thus, employees are better able to collaborate when working with enterprise data.

How Do You Replicate ServiceNow Data in a Data Warehouse?

The potential for human error and limitations to the volumes of data that can be replicated mean manual data entry is not a viable, scalable solution. 

Integrations enable the replication of ServiceNow data to a data warehouse. However, the type of integration should be carefully considered to avoid issues such as performance degradation and lacking the internal resources to effectively implement and maintain the integration.

For example, many organizations opt to implement API-based integrations, but find configuration and maintenance time-consuming, and the volumes of data they need to replicate put a considerable strain on ServiceNow and its performance. 

When choosing an integration approach, organizations should consider three common approaches:

Building and maintaining integrations in-house

Some organizations opt to build custom integrations in-house. However, building an integration in-house takes considerable time and resources for the implementation alone, with subsequent maintenance putting a further strain on internal teams.

Over time, a number of hidden costs amount, and errors incur a substantial technical debt.

Such an approach is also vulnerable to developer turnover. Not only are organizations limited to hiring developers with the specific skill set to support the integration, documentation of the integration is often in-comprehensive. 

New hires have to reverse engineer the technology and processes to support them effectively, leading to operational disruption.

Implementing pre-built, API-based integrations

API-based ServiceNow integrations benefit the time to implementation, as the organization can work with pre-existing technology rather than starting from scratch. 

However, organizations typically have a unique set of requirements, technologies and circumstances. This means the supposed “one-size-fits-all” approach actually requires significant and time-consuming configuration to ensure it meets the organization’s needs. 

Since the organization is only provided with the integration technology, both the implementation and subsequent maintenance (i.e. troubleshooting/fixing issues, and revising the integration to be compatible with new versions of ServiceNow) require considerable internal resources. 

It should also be noted that since the technology operates externally to ServiceNow, the API calls made to the platform to facilitate data transfers impact ServiceNow’s performance. 

Developer turnover and documentation is also an issue here. Experience with API integrations is a must and while they are easier to manage than a custom-built solution, documentation must reflect the particular customizations and processes the organization has put in place.

This has a negative effect on the rate at which data can be transferred from the platform, and on the use of ServiceNow itself as the platform’s resources are required to facilitate the process.

ServiceNow provides its own API-based integration platform – the Integration Hub –  but for the reasons that include those listed above, the organization uses another method to work with its internal ServiceNow data.

Outsource to a Trusted ServiceNow Integration Service Provider

Organizations that outsource the responsibility of integration implementation and maintenance to a trusted provider benefit from a no-code solution, fast time-to-value, and can put internal resources to better use. 

The integration is insulated from developer turnover and poor documentation as the integration service provider’s expertise is on-hand as long as the organization is a customer. 

When outsourcing integrations, organization’s should carefully select the integration service providers as both the levels of service and technology will differ between providers. 

For organizations that want to benefit from an integration that supports API-free, high-throughput data replication, and is implemented, maintained and supported 24/7×365, Perspectium is a recommended and trusted provider, used by ServiceNow themselves.  

Populate Data Warehouses Quickly With Perspectium’s ServiceNow Data Replication Solution

Perspectium is a service and solution for extracting and replicating ServiceNow data. Among other use cases, Perspectium provides a no-code means of quickly populating data warehouses.

It can extract and replicate over 1 million records per day without impacting ServiceNow’s performance. 

Users benefit from Perspectium’s as-a-service delivery model, with implementation and subsequent maintenance handled by Perspectium. Users also benefit from Perspectium’s commitment to support – with it provided 24/7, 365 days a week. 

Speaking to the quality of the service and solution, ServiceNow uses Perspectium to replicate its own ServiceNow data externally. 

Despite offering its own API-based solution, ServiceNow opted to become a Perspectium customer, citing its requirement for performance impact free, high-throughput integrations, Perspectium’s ease of use, and its ability to provide quick results.

“Everyone loves the product. It’s very easy to manage and we are able to provide quick results to the business – that is key” – Venugopal Malyala, ServiceNow Senior Director of BI, MDM & Analytics

Check out more real-world success stories here.